Schedule 72. StuTS

Bahaso Melayu Pakning (BMP), also known as Siak Malay, is a variety of Malay spoken in the Bengkalis regency in Riau province, Indonesia. Together with a small group of students, I conducted a fieldwork study on the BMP demonstrative system in collaboration with a native speaker. Based on the Wilkins (1999) Demonstrative Questionnaire, we acted out scenarios to prompt the use of the two demonstratives tu and ni in the informant, recorded her speech and took note of gesturing. The data was complemented by additional recordings of free and narrative speech, and yielded a rather conclusive account of the spatial, temporal and discourse deictic use of the two-term demonstrative system which I classified according to Levinson’s (2004) deixis taxonomy. The two demonstratives can be identified as proximal and distal in their spatial use, with interesting irregularities attested in narrative contexts as well as ones reaching into the pragmatic sphere. BMP relies on time deixis in lieu of tense, and the spatial use of the two markers seems to map neatly onto the temporal system. This hypothesis is backed up by data from Standard Indonesian, which is a related language that coexists in the region and is spoken by most of the population. Finally, the discourse deictic anaphoric use of the demonstratives suggests an ongoing grammaticalization process of the distal marker tu into a definite article or pronoun, supported by a hint in the existing personal pronominal paradigm. This hypothesis is, however, left unconfirmed by the data.

Info

Day: 2022-11-05
Start time: 10:45
Duration: 00:30
Room: Wiwi-Bunker —Room 5050
Track: Typology and Variational Linguistics
Language: en

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